[maxmamis]

> If being a landlord is so easy, why wouldn't everyone do it?

maybe just sit and think about this one for a minute?

the answer is that they don't have the capital, which is why it's a relationship of exploitation. by virtue of owning more capital than me, my landlord feels entitled to the fruit of my own labor. it's just feudalism in a new garb, as reflected in the terms we use (landlord/lady)

[endisneigh]

You don’t need much capital to be a landlord, hence mortgages. If you’ve never owned a house you can put literally 0% down.

The reasons to not be a landlord are plenty:

- potential downturn in the area

- tenants ruining your property

- inability to do maintenance affordably

- provide basic amenities and keep up with legal obligations can and do change unexpectedly

- potential eviction expense and risk

- rent collection, as we’ve seen from the pandemic

- dealing with people

People who think being a landlord is a slam dunk as long as you have the capital and it’s no work don’t know what they’re talking about.

Reminds me of people who think running a website is free money because the computer does everything.

[maxmamis]

I never said it was “free money,” i said it was exploitation. just because it takes some effort to extract money from me doesn’t make it justifiable.

In other words, here’s the world’s smallest violin for my landlord’s “potential eviction expense and risk”

as for mortgages, please show me a worker living paycheck to paycheck who’s been approved for a mortgage for a twelve unit building

[endisneigh]

How is being a landlord any more exploitative than offering any other service?

Tenants are under no obligation to rent to a given landlord or in a given area.

Your example doesn’t really make sense - someone living paycheck to paycheck would default on a mortgage even if they got one. It’s for those people that renting makes the most sense.

You originally implied that renting out property is not a job, which implies no work. To receive money for doing nothing would be “free.”

Anyway, you seem to have an irrational hatred of landlords based on falsehoods. Hopefully you can find solace.

[danaris]

Landlords do not offer a service.

They hoard housing, making it scarce, thus forcing others to rent it from them if they want to be housed.

If we outlawed the practice, landlords would have to sell their properties, significantly increasing the number of residential units on the market, and thus reducing the price and making it much more likely that someone living paycheck to paycheck would be able to afford a mortgage on one.

None of the work involved in maintaining a property requires that the person (or company) doing so be the property's owner. It would still be perfectly reasonable for an apartment building, as a co-op, to hire a single management company to handle cleaning, maintenance, etc—somewhat similarly to how some HOAs hire a company to do landscaping for all their residents. And, yes, potentially subject to inefficiency and corruption, but we live in an imperfect world, and it's not like apartment maintenance is a perfect bastion of competence and altruism today.

[thegrimmest]

Housing doesn't just grow on trees. It's capital-intensive to produce. Capital that needs to see a return on investment, since it doesn't exist in a vacuum. There are a certain class of people that simply cannot be relied on to pay a mortgage. These people still demand housing, so are served by the renters market. If you force every landlord to sell their housing, you're basically punishing them for investing. Since your heavy-handed regulation has now scared off all the capital from housing, how will you build new houses?

[notch656a]

I'm not a fan of eliminating landlords, but I can easily and trivially see a system how housing is built and provided without landlords or mortgage providers. The old Latin American way: you buy each brick when you can afford it. Unfortunately the imbeciles in government would have an aneurism: "NOO!!! you can't just buy bricks and stack them without a special stamp on a piece of paper!!!! How else can I buy my next new Prius without your tax money?"

I lived for months out of a tent, and virtually the only reason I don't now is because of the retarded CPS / child abuse regulations in US let petty bureaucrats arbitrarily decide what adequate housing is. The US has insane building codes and zoning regulations that make housing way less affordable than it could be to build with a working man's cash.

[maxmamis]

> Your example doesn’t really make sense - someone living paycheck to paycheck would default on a mortgage even if they got one. It’s for those people that renting makes the most sense.

you just made my point for me — there is a class of the population that is forced into spending a third (often more!) of their income on housing, which is being hoarded by another class. no different from a feudal serf being forced to turn over their hard-won harvest to the nobility. but sure, they can go find another manor to live on, they’re under no obligation to give their labor to this particular lord...

[thegrimmest]

So are you saying that people should not be allowed to.. accumulate capital? It's a bit of a radical thing to suggest. How did the landlord get the money to afford the building in the first place? Say he was a high-ranking professional or a successful entrepreneur and he used the capital he earned to buy a building - what's immoral here exactly?

[maxmamis]

it’s only “radical” from the narrow perspective of the last few hundred years of western capitalism.

> Say he was a high-ranking professional or a successful entrepreneur and he used the capital he earned to buy a building - what's immoral here exactly?

he’s using his capital to extract more wealth from those with fewer resources than himself. (that’s also how he accumulated the capital in the first place — but that’s another conversation.)